SMITH'S SUMMARY: Team spirit helped us to opening-day win

When I took on this job at Scarborough, I pinched a quote I'd seen from the West Leeds coach.
Simon Smith's weekly columnSimon Smith's weekly column
Simon Smith's weekly column

He outlined his belief that if you’re down in the trenches and struggling, you’ll always give an extra five or 10% if you look to your left or right and your mate is stood next to you.

That resonated with me on Saturday when we travelled to a highly-fancied Bradford & Bingley side and played them off the park in a 53-33.

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We won as “a team” against a group of players you can tell have yet to gel and have been assembled over the summer.

Bradford & Bingley came down from the division above last season and have spent big to try and get straight back up, and I have no doubt in my mind that they fully believed they’d beat us pretty comfortably on Saturday.

I’m not into this “making a statement” belief, we just want to go out and play our brand of rugby and take it game by game.

We were superb from start to finish, and although they battled to get back into the game, we always managed to maintain that 20-point cushion.

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If you’d have told me just over a year ago when I took over that we’d even be playing Bradford & Bingley in a league game, I wouldn’t have believed you.

So to go there and win so emphatically just shows how far we’ve come and the potential of this side.

Seventeen of the 18 we had on Saturday were playing for us last season, and the 18th, Tom Hicks, had trained with us but suffered an injury.

The average age of our squad on Saturday was only 24 and 10 of those were Scarborough lads, which makes our achievements even more pleasing.

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This side has huge potential but we need to to take it one game at a time.

The only negative was that we lost Tom Harrison to a knee injury.

I spoke to him earlier in the week and it’s still stiff. He’ll see a physio and we’ll assess him later in the week.

I doubt he’ll be ready for the Bridlington game.